False Memory

she ceased resistance. After a while longer, her body unclenched, and she returned his embrace, tentatively at first, but then less tentatively, until by degrees she opened entirely and clung to him as he clung to her, with a desperate love, with an acute awareness that their lives had changed forever, and with an unnerving sense that they now existed under the shadow of a great looming unknown.

    27
    After watching the evening news, Susan Jagger went through the apartment, synchronizing all the clocks with her digital wristwatch. She performed this task every Tuesday evening at the same hour.
    In the kitchen, clocks were built into the oven and microwave, and another hung on the wall. A stylish, battery-operated Art Deco clock stood on the fireplace mantel in the living room, and on the nightstand beside her bed was a clock radio.
    On average, none of these timepieces lost or gained more than a minute during the week, but Susan took pleasure in keeping them running tick for tick.
    Through sixteen months of near isolation and chronic anxiety, she had relied on ritual to save her sanity.
    For every household chore, she established elaborate procedures to which she adhered as rigorously as an engineer would follow the operational manual in a nuclear power plant where imprecision might mean meltdown. Waxing floors or polishing furniture became a lengthy enterprise that filled otherwise empty hours. Performing any task to high standards, while conforming to codified housekeeping rules, gave her a sense of control that was comforting even though she recognized that it was fundamentally an illusion.
    After the clocks were synchronized, Susan went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. A tomato-and-endive salad. Chicken marsala.
    Cooking was her favorite work of the day. She followed recipes with scientific exactitude, measuring and combining ingredients as carefully as a bombmaker handling explosive, unstable chemicals. Culinary rituals and religious rituals, like no others, could calm the heart and quiet the mind, perhaps because the former fed the body and the latter fed the soul.
    This evening, however, she wasn’t able to concentrate on dicing, grating, measuring, stirring. Her attention repeatedly strayed to the silent telephone. She was eager to hear from Martie, now that she’d at last found the courage to mention the mysterious night visitor.
    Before recent events, she’d thought she could reveal anything to Martie with complete comfort, without feeling self-conscious. For six months, however, she’d been unable to speak of the sexual assaults committed against her while she slept.
    Shame silenced her, but shame inhibited her less than did the concern that she’d be thought delusional. She herself found it hard to believe that she could have been stripped out of her sleepwear, raped, and re-dressed on numerous occasions without being awakened.
    Eric was no sorcerer with the ability to steal in and out of the apartment—and in and out of Susan herself—utterly undetected.
    Although Eric might be as weak and morally confused as Martie said, Susan was reluctant to consider that he might hate her enough to do these things to her, and hatred was undeniably at the heart of this abuse. They had loved each other, and their separation had been marked by regret, not by anger.
    If he wanted her, even without the obligation to stand by her in time of need, she might welcome him. There was no reason, then, why he should scheme so elaborately to take her against her will.
    Yet... if not Eric, who?
    Having shared this house with her and having used this top floor as his home office, Eric might know a way to circumvent the doors and windows—as unlikely as that seemed. No one else was sufficiently familiar with the place to come and go undetected.
    Her hand trembled, and salt spilled from the measuring spoon.
    Turning from the dinner preparations, she blotted her suddenly damp palms on a dish towel.
    At the apartment door, she checked the dead bolts. Both were engaged. The security chain was in place.
    She leaned with her back against the door.
    I am not delusional.
    On the phone, Martie had seemed to believe her.
    Convincing others, however, might not be easy.
    Evidence supporting her contention of rape was inconclusive. Sometimes she experienced vaginal tenderness, but not always. Bruises the size of a man’s fingertips occasionally appeared on her thighs and breasts, but she couldn’t prove they were the work of a rapist or that